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Tuesday, March 17, 2015

Ads

I have been soooo sick of online ads lately. If I leave my laptop unmuted, I get attacked by obnoxious sound ads. And don’t get me started on the hated pop-ups. It’s like, advertisers think that if they make the ads obnoxious enough, we’ll pay attention to them, which is some sort of logic I can’t wrap my head around, like string theory or why Law and Order: SVU is still on.

But! There are ways to block them. Adblock Plus is considered one of the best, and it’s available as extensions for all browsers, including Firefox, Chrome, and Opera if you have to be different. As for Explorer...well, I’m sure it works, but if you’re using Explorer, that’s an entirely different problem and frankly, you’re asking for trouble. Adblock is good because you can adjust it to allow non-intrusive ads (e.g. regular banner ads) so the sites you visit still get their ad revenue. I follow a lot of independent web comics and I want to support them, so it’s a good option. Just remember you have to go into options and adjust it manually.

So that’s enough unpaid shilling for today. Ads mostly suck. And if advertisers really want their messages heard, they need to stop being so obnoxious.

Most ads don't pay you just for being there. You have to actually click through for the host to earn revenue from it. And, some of them, you actually have to make a purchase before the host earns anything.

Every once in awhile I'll hear a pop up ad come up while checking out a site. It's annoying, particularly because I tend to listen to music while I work, and lo and behold, there's someone screeching about insurance over the music I'm wanting to hear.

Self-starting videos on news websites really tick me off! I want to read the article, not watch the video. And now the new thing seems to be that you can't pause the ad that comes before the video. Don't they (the ad people, the website people) know that nothing makes people leave the site faster than a self-starting ad video? Apparently not.

Those ads with sound really piss me off. I write early in the morning and late at night when the rest of the family are asleep. If I forget to turn the sound off on my computer, sometimes I wake the whole house when I click on a site. Not happy family!